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There’s been a relatively recent swelling of $100M ARR commercial open-source businesses (Confluent, Elastic, Mongo, GitLab). The common strategy seems to be an “open core” with $$$ enterprise-level addons. Are there any examples on that scale with consumers as customers?

Kanjun

@kanjun

Mar 26, 2020

I think the best consumer analog to open-core is the freemium model - Dropbox, Airtable, Slack, etc.

Andy Matuschak

@andy_matuschak

Replying to

@kanjun

That seems to be right! But it's unfortunate that none of these actually have an open core. Related: I wonder why there isn't more "source available"-licensed commercial software.

2:05 AM · Mar 26, 2020Twitter Web App

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Ah, I see. Open source businesses for enterprises are often open core because they wouldn't be adopted otherwise - enterprises were too burned by Oracle to build their infrastructure on top of something that they don't have control over.

Kanjun

@kanjun

Mar 26, 2020

So, being open source is a competitive advantage. Whereas in consumer, it's less of a competitive advantage. Zulip probably has the closest to "open core" for consumer - it's a Slack-like chat app that is mostly open source.

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and

There are a growing number of projects that use source available licenses: cockroachlabs.com/blog/oss-relic, sentry.io/_/open-source/, mariadb.com/bsl-faq-adopti, mongodb.com/community/lice, though I think the jury is still out on where this is most effective.

&'static dcramer

@zeeg

Mar 26, 2020

Source available can be the same as freemium, but it’s still dependent on the license. Our use of BSL is very much freemium, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Open core could arguably be thought of as the same, but usually those businesses approach it differently.